by Frank Conroy
They awoke in the early afternoon and stayed in bed. Although the small stove was working it was still the warmest place. Freed from the necessity of keeping quiet, I walked around the room aimlessly, getting a drink of water, rubbing the haze off the windows to look outside. My mother raised her voice and I realized she was talking to me.
“Take some money from my purse and go down to the Greens’ and get a dozen eggs.”
The trip to the Greens’ would take an hour each way. Outside the temperature was five or ten degrees below zero and it was windy. I didn’t want to go. My heart sank because I knew I had to.
Children are in the curious position of having to do what people tell them, whether they want to or not. A child knows that he must do what he’s told. It matters little whether a command is just or unjust since the child has no confidence in his ability to distinguish the difference. Justice for children is not the same as justice for adults. In effect all commands are morally neutral to a child. Yet because almost every child is consistently bullied by older people he quickly learns that if in some higher frame of reference all commands are equally just, they are not equally easy to carry out. Some fill him with joy, others, so obviously unfair that he must paralyze himself to keep from recognizing their quality, strike him instantly deaf, blind, and dumb. Faced with an order they sense is unfair children simply stall. They wait for more information, for some elaboration that will take away the seeming unfairness. It’s a stupid way of defending oneself, but children are stupid compared to adults, who know how to get what they want.
“Couldn’t we wait until they come up with the wagon?”
“No. The walk will do you good. You can’t sit around all day, it’s unhealthy.”
“Oh Mother, it’ll take hours.”
Suddenly Jean sat up, his voice trembling with anger. “Look, this time just go. No arguments this time.”
I looked at him in amazement. He’d never even raised his voice to me before. It was against the unwritten rules —my mother was the disciplinarian. I could see he was angry and I had no idea why. Even my mother was surprised. “Take it easy,” she said to him softy. “He’s going.”
Jean’s anger should have tipped me off, but it didn’t. Wearing his galoshes and his overcoat I went to the Greens’ without realizing why they had sent me.
It was no secret that I wanted to go along to the training school at night, to sleep on an extra bed somewhere. For months Mother put me off, but when she realized I would never get accustomed to staying alone she gave in. She was tired of dealing with me, tired of my complaints and my silences. (Alternative unconscious motivations for her change of heart: one, she felt guilty about me; two, she decided to show me something that was worth being afraid of—namely, the worst men’s cottage, to which Jean was assigned the night I tagged along.)
We drove slowly down the steep, twisting road to Southbury, our headlight beams traversing back and forth across the snow. Jean leaned over the wheel, craning his neck to watch for the cutoff through the black truncated trees. “It’s along here somewhere.”
“We have to pass that boarded-up farmhouse,” my mother said.
“Here it is.” He applied the brakes slowly and the tires pulled against the sanded road. We were entering the grounds through the back, saving a mile. The car bumped along through the woods for a few hundred yards and then emerged at the top of a hill.
The Southbury Training School spread below us like a toy village in a Christmas display. Small dormitories disguised to look like suburban homes were spread evenly over a square mile of stripped and graded hillside. Halfway down, the two administrative buildings rose into the air, their white cupolas lighted by floodlights. Weaving across the hillside in every direction were the lines and curves of a network of private roads, described in the darkness by chains of street lights winking on slender poles.
Jean edged the Ford over the lip of the hill and the bumpy dirt road changed immediately to a smooth, carefully plowed asphalt ribbon. We rolled along silently, watching the powdered snow drift across the surface of the road under the headlights.
“There it is,” my mother said as we approached one of the dormitories. “Number Twelve.”
Jean pulled up in the driveway. There was a brass knocker on the front door, and a mailbox, and a green metal tube on a stand with “Danbury Times” written in elaborate lettering. I caught some movement out of the corner of my eyes. The blinds were raised in one of the ground-floor windows and a girl stood combing her hair with long, even strokes. She saw the lights of the car and smiled. Half her teeth were gone. I looked away quickly.
My mother rang the bell and stood close to the door to be out of the wind. Almost immediately it swung open, spilling a long bar of yellow light across the snow. She lifted her hand in a signal that could just as easily have meant we should wait a moment as to wave goodbye, and was gone.
We drove slowly across the hill toward the boys’ side of the school. In the bad weather the roads were empty.
“It looks deserted,” I said.
“It isn’t. Wait till you get inside.”
The tires spun on a patch of ice as we climbed the driveway to Cottage Eight. We stopped next to a black Chevy, the only car in the parking area. Its windshield was coated with snow.
“That’s Olsen’s car. He has the shift before mine.”
“It’s brand new.”
“Some of these guys work two shifts. They make a lot of money.”
“Why don’t you?”
He laughed. We sat for a moment, watching the building. Jean took out a cigarette. “The smell is pretty bad at first but after a couple of hours you don’t notice it.”
I could see small ways in which the building differed from the one my mother had entered. There was no box for the newspaper, no potted evergreens at the edge of the drive. Even in the darkness one could see that the front door needed painting. Some of the shutters were closed.
“None of these people are dangerous, are they?”
Jean finished his cigarette. “They’re just feeble-minded. They can’t take care of themselves.”
We stepped out of the car. The air was cold and gusts of wind seemed to pass uninterrupted through my clothes. After a few steps the smell began, like a tangible line in space. Smells are hard to describe. This was a combination of pine, vomit, licorice, old urine, sweat, soap, and wet hair. Jean rang the bell and after a few moments the door opened.
I was prepared, of course, but prepared through my imagination, and I couldn’t possibly have imagined the reality. First of all it was hot, really hot, like a furnace room. I began to sweat immediately. The smell was overpowering. It was useless to breathe carefully as I’d done outside; here the smell was so pungent and thick it seemed to have taken the place of air—a hot substitute filling my lungs, seeping into my blood, and making me its own creature. With the first deep breath I was no longer an air breather. I’d changed to another species.
It was noisy. A noise that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Far-out throats, tongues, and lips forming sounds that wound their independent way up and down the scale with no relation to anything. Whispering, mumbling, fake laughter and true laughter, bubbling sounds, short screams, bored humming, weeping, long roller-coaster yells—all of it in random dynamic waves like some futuristic orchestra. In this meaningless music were sudden cries of such intense human significance that I stood paralyzed.
It was as if all the saints, martyrs, and mystics of human history were gathered into a single building, each one crying out at the moment of revelation, each one truly there at his extreme of joy or pain, crying out with the purity of total selflessness. There was no arguing with these sudden voices above the general clamor, they rang true. All around me were men in a paroxysm of discovery, seeing lands I had never known existed, calling me with a strength I had never known existed. But they called from every direction with equal power, so I couldn’t answer. I stood balanced on the pinpoint of my own sanity
, a small, cracked tile on the floor.
“They’re a little noisy now. It’s just before bedtime and we let them blow off some steam.”
I looked up and discovered a huge man standing in front of me, smiling. Involuntarily I took a step backward. He was all eyes, immense white eyes impossibly out of his head, rushing at me. No, he was wearing his eyes like glasses. Two bulbous eyes in steel frames. He turned his head and the illusion disappeared. Thick lenses, that was all. His bald head gleamed with sweat. His arm was as big as my leg.
“I’m Olsen,” he said.
“Where’s Jean?”
“He’ll be back in a minute.”
There was movement behind his back. I watched from the corner of my eye, afraid to look directly. A naked man slipping into the room, hunched over like a beaten dog, a shiny thread of spittle hanging from his jaw. He cruised silently along the wall, limp fingers touching the plaster, turned, and stopped, his shaggy head facing the blank wall one inch away. Without even looking Olsen raised his voice and said, “Back to bed.”
The creature lifted one leg and touched his toes to the surface of the wall as if it was a ladder he was about to climb. Below the tangle of black hair in his crotch, his veined penis and scrotum hung limply almost halfway to the knee, against the inside of his thigh. It was as if they’d been grabbed and stretched like soft taffy. His toes scratched the wall. Olsen took a step toward him, leaning over slightly, and clapped his hands smartly. “Back to bed!” The creature scurried along the wall and disappeared through an open doorway. For the first time I noticed there were no doors. Doorways without doors. From each darkened passageway the noises rushed at us. Suddenly, the sound of a crash. Olsen knew just where it came from. “Back in a second,” he said.
Alone in the room, I stood by the door, my hand touching the knob. I could hear Olsen shouting in another part of the building. Far back in the corridors half-visible figures were moving in the dim light. I supposed that Jean was with them.
An old man appeared, hesitating at the edge of the room. When he saw me he froze instantly, like a highly trained hunting animal. His watery blue eyes were fuzzy spirals and his cheeks sank into his head, making hollows the size of ping-pong balls. He wore a kind of diaper from which his skinny legs, all tendon and finely wrinkled skin, emerged, half bent with age. He took a step forward.
“Back to bed!” I said. “Back to bed!” For a moment he didn’t move, then, leaning his head back, he opened his mouth and revealed two gleaming pink gums, toothless, looking like wet rubber. His thin shoulders shook with laughter. When his fuzzy eyes found me he shouted across the room.
“Sonny, I’ve been here since before you were born. I don’t even belong here. I belong in a mental hospital. Everybody knows that.” He turned and left the room.
I wanted to wait outside until Jean came back. There was a large brass lock high on the door. I turned what seemed to be the appropriate knob but the bolt didn’t move. Examining the mechanism more closely, I heard a noise behind me.
Something was rushing down one of the corridors, something low and fast. No bullfighter ever waited for his foe more apprehensively. To my amazement I found myself giving a short, nervous laugh, a desperate guffaw in the teeth of my predicament. Zooming into the room was a flash of chrome-man, a monstrous human machine blurred with speed, bearing down on me like a homicidal hot-rodder. A man in a wheelchair, but what kind of man? His body was tiny, like a child’s, his head impossibly huge, the size of a watermelon. Flailing at the wheels of his chair like a berserk rowboat enthusiast, he backed me into a corner and threw his hands into my face.
“See my pretty ‘racelet?” he said in a high voice. “See my pretty ’racelet?”
Flinching, twisting to avoid the touch of his wild hands, I tried to slip past. He slammed his chair into the wall and trapped me.
“See my pretty ’racelet?”
“What? What do you want? What?” Reluctantly I looked him in the eye. His bland idiot’s features seemed small in the gargantuan hydrocephalic head. All scrunched together in the cavity that was his face they stared out at me like a fish from a goldfish bowl.
“See my pretty ’racelet?” he said, still holding his arms up. In a tantrum of infantile frustration he drummed his heels against the bottom of the chair. “See! See!”
“He wants you to look at his bracelet,” Jean said, grabbing the back of the chair and pulling him away. “This is Freddie. His nickname is pinhead.”
“Pinhead, pinhead! See!”
“Go ahead,” Jean said. “Just look at it.”
Around the creature’s wrist was a cheap chrome I.D. bracelet. He held his hand motionless when he realized I was looking at it. The word FREDDIE was engraved in block letters. I touched it with my index finger. “It’s very pretty. Very nice.”
“Pretty ’racelet?” Freddie said, calmer now.
“Yes. Very pretty.”
“Pretty ’racelet?”
Olsen appeared from one of the corridors. His big feet clomped noisily on the tile floor. “Time for lights out?”
“Okay,” Jean answered, rolling Freddie away. “Frank, you can go in the office.” He pointed to an open doorway.
Freddie rocked back and forth in the chair. “Lice-out. Lice-out. Lice-out.”
Olsen reached out and slapped his immense dome with an open hand. “Shut up, idiot.” They rolled him down one of the corridors.
The office was a small room with a desk, a chair, and a cot. There was no door to close. I sat on the cot and watched the blank wall. As Jean and Olsen progressed through the building turning out lights, the screaming gradually subsided, falling to a steady murmur like the crowd noises in a movie. It was less nerve-wracking, but somehow more ominous. The mood in the building was changing from wildness to slyness. Plans were beginning to cook in countless heads, and as a novelty, a break in the routine, it seemed to me that I would be the focus. I jumped up nervously as Olsen came in. He looked down at me, his big white eyes embedded in their surrealistic lenses. “I’m going off now. I want to show you something.”
I followed him out of the office, sticking close behind. We took a few steps into a hallway and stopped. In the gloom stray rays of light collected in his glasses like fireflies.
“The boys are harmless. They’re scareder of you than you are of them, so you got nothing to worry about. I want to show you this guy so you know what he looks like. A couple of times he’s grabbed a broom and snuck up behind somebody and belted them. If he ever tries anything all you got to do is look him in the eye and he backs down.”
“Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t see me.”
“He won’t. He can’t see past the light.”
There was a snapping sound and a powerful flashlight beam showed us a glowing circle of green wall. We took a few steps and the beam spilled into a small room. With a flick of his wrist Olsen found the occupant, sitting on his bed, knees drawn up to his chest, rocking slowly back and forth. (In the South they call it hunkering.) He looked young, and strong—completely normal except for his nakedness and the fixed expression of anger on his face. His eyes blinked in the strong light but he didn’t look away. The creaking of the bedsprings stopped as he held himself rigid. He seemed to be looking directly into my eyes in a contest of wills. Suddenly his head jerked forward and a glob of spittle curved through the air and fell at my feet.
“Tough guy,” said Olsen. “Once he threw his own shit at me. But he’ll never do that again.”
My eyes were locked with the inmate’s. “Did you punish him?”
“Punish him!” Olsen laughed. “I beat the living daylights out of him. He was in the infirmary for three days.”
“Did he understand?”
“What?”
“Did he understand why you hit him?”
“He didn’t throw no more shit so I guess he did.”
“What’s his name?”
“Gregory.”
“Can we go back now?”
“He doesn’t know how lucky he is. He’s the only one in the building with a room of his own. Look.” He flashed his light up the halls. Beds were set up along the walls of the corridor. People were sitting up in them watching us silently. Most of them fell back as the light struck them, like dominoes in a row. To the rest Olsen yelled “Lights out! Bedtime!”
“Can we go back now?”
Olsen had gone off duty and Jean and I were in the office.
“Lovely, isn’t it,” Jean said sitting on the edge of the desk.
“Is there any place with a door? I’d feel better with a door.”
“No, but you’ll be all right.”
“What about that guy named Gregory?”
“He won’t do anything. He’s probably asleep. They go to sleep like that.” He snapped his fingers. After a moment he raised his head and stared out the doorway. “Isn’t it incredible the way some of them are hung? They’ve got equipment a horse would be proud of.”
“Jean, I don’t think I can make it.”
“It’s perfectly safe.” He stood up. “I’ve got to make the rounds.”
“I can’t stay here.”
“Well I can’t take you back. You’ll just have to.”
“I’ll sleep in the car.”
“It’s freezing out there.”
“I’ll take some blankets. It’ll be all right.”
He stood for a moment without answering.
“Please, Jean.”
“Okay. Suit yourself. I’ve got to make the rounds.” He started out, then looked back. “If it gets too cold out there you’d better come back in.”
“I will. Yes. Thanks.” Quickly I began to strip the blankets from the cot. Then, remembering, I rushed after him. “Jean! The lock! How do you work the lock?”
So for the rest of the winter I stayed in the cabin at night. I never got used to it, but in some ways the nights were better than the days. The nights were warm fantasies of terror, Technicolor nightmares. I recognized somehow that everything hapening to me alone at night in the cabin was of a low order of reality. My hallucinations, the fear itself, the entire drama came from inside my own head. I was making it all, and although it was terrifying, it was not, as were the days, cosmically threatening.